Suppose all our current problems -- the intractable issues of war, pollution, and environmental degradation; crime, injustice, and inequality -- are rooted in our way of seeing the world, and as long as we remain inside that worldview the possibilities for creating a better world are groundless and nonexistent.
My forthcoming book, Letters to the River, Nine Steps Toward a Dream Worth Living explores our current mythology or “dream” and how it programs us to create a world of disconnection, violence, and despair, and it illuminates the new myths we must incorporate to create a world that’s joyful, meaningful, and magical.
Letters to the River includes over one hundred forty essays that span the divergent shores of the known and the unknown, the ordinary and extraordinary. Divided into nine thematic chapters, each with an introduction, the book is both psychological exploration and spiritual adventure, showing the steps we must take to repair the rift between self and other, human and non-human, and find the path that leads back to “the Garden.” The essays, or “letters,” probe the shifting boundaries of the daily and the dream and lay bare the ecology of enchantment shimmering just below the surface. They both expose the confines of our cultural paradigm and report from out beyond the fences, revealing how we create the world we perceive and illustrating the new myths we must embrace to realize the rich possibilities available to us in a multi-dimensional and shamanistic universe.
Since my undergraduate days at Stanford in the creative and chaotic ‘60’s, I knew I did not want an ordinary life, and my compelling interest in the worlds of Carlos Castaneda and non-ordinary reality has taken me on adventures from the mountains of Mexico to the Amazon jungle. Over the last thirty years I have apprenticed with Native American and Mexican medicine men, explored cutting-edge therapies and traditional counseling, and taken part in countless encounters and engagements with the spirit, including twenty-five vision quests. For twenty years I have guided vision quests and taught workshops on shamanism, non-ordinary reality, and finding your heroic myth. The expositions and accounts in this book have grown out of this experience, and I include the samples and selections below -- Preface, Introduction, two chapter introductions, and a selection of the "letters" themselves -- for your inspiration and pleasure.
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